Paytm appoints two ex-Google executives to head its advertising and cloud businesses

Paytm has has hired two former Google executives, Praveen Sharma and Ankit Sinha, to head its advertising business and cloud offering. Both will report directly to Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Digital payments major Paytm, the brand owned by One97 Communications, has hired two former Google executives, Praveen Sharma and Ankit Sinha, to head its advertising business and cloud offering respectively.

Both of them will report directly to Paytm Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Speaking on the matter, Vijay Shekhar Sharma said,

“Over the years, Paytm has built a large consumer and merchant base. Focusing on monetisation opportunities, we will have Praveen and Ankit build our advertising and cloud offerings for Indian businesses. Praveen has built the most formidable advertising business and Ankit comes with an understanding of SMB needs.”

Praveen Sharma has been appointed as Senior Vice President, Ad Business, while Ankit Sinha has joined as Vice President of Paytm AI Cloud.

Praveen Sharma comes from Google where he spent the last nine years in leadership roles across India and APAC. Most recently he was based in Singapore and was responsible for driving Google's performance media across the Asia-Pacific region. Leading up to Google, Praveen held several senior-level positions across some major advertising groups like Madison and Group M.

“With a user base of 350 million and a massive transaction and traffic volume and momentum, it's poised just right to build an ads business that sits on top of all of these services. I'm very excited to be leading this charge,” Praveen said.

Ankit Sinha comes with 15 years of professional experience. Previously, he worked as Regional Business Lead at Google Cloud for six years, primarily in the cloud sales and enterprise partnerships role. Prior to Google, he was part of SAP for seven years, building the SMBs focused partner programme.

Talking about his new role at Paytm, Ankit said,

“Paytm has ushered digital payments in India and I am excited to be a part of this team. We expect to start new revenue streams with our SMB merchants, as well as larger corporations across developers and various lines of business. Paytm would leverage its big data and machine learning prowess to provide innovative solutions in different markets.”